In the art of making steel box toes for safety shoes, it has been customary to utilize a sheet or strip of steel which is subjected to a series of stamping and cutting operations. These include pressing the metal into a bowl-shaped workpiece in a draw press; trimming excess material around the bowl-shaped workpiece; parting the workpiece to form left and right toe cap parts; and finally, forming last-engaging flanges on the bottom edges of each of the separated toe cap parts. Drawing and trimming are usually combined in a single press with excess material being cut or pinched off. A variation of this method is to cut a blank in outline and subsequently press the blank to form a desired bowl shape.
Each of these methods which combine parting and trimming are objectionable for one reason or another. Thus cutting an outline of sheet material and forming the blank requires a larger area of flat stock and uses a greater weight of steel than that utilized where the stock is first drawn and then trimmed. However, in order to draw and then trim the follow-through motion of the die punch and the fit of the die punch with its mating die part must be very precise. Also since the drawing and trimming must be done in powerful presses and the workpiece is eccentric and irregular in shape, damage to tool parts can easily occur if too much pressure is used. If too little pressure is utilized, trimming may not occur uniformly.
A further complication arises in making a more recent style of toe cap having a "wing-back" or "wing-guard" shape. This stype of toe cap provides additional protection to the sides of the front. A pressed bowl shape, instead of being cut to form caps whose back edges are in essentially vertical lines, is cut at an angle so that metal extends along the bottom edge of the shoe for a distance greater than it does at the top. To produce toe cap parts having the wing-guard shape, it has been proposed to make the bowl-shaped workpiece with two lobes which extend in angularly opposed relation to one another. When this shape is parted by a straight cut, and the separated lobes are rotated so that their long sides are in an essentially horizontal position, it will be seen that the straight cut now assumes an inclined position extending from the top rearwardly to the back of the top cap at its lower edge, as desired. When forming a bowl-shape having the lobes described, there is, however, a tendency for metal to become stretched along the shortest and straightest line between the lobes with some imprecision occurring. Toe cap edges cut through the imprecise central section of the stretched lobes may require reshaping and use of a separate press operation.